So yesterday you probably saw one of the thousands of tweets, Facebook posts or forwarded emails about the girl who quit her job by emailing her boss and work colleagues a series of pictures of herself. The story made the news on a host of websites, blogs and media outlets such as CBS.

“Jenny” was sick of her boss’s attitude and hearing him call her a HOPA (hot piece of ass) on the phone was the last straw. She grabbed her whiteboard and a marker and was photographed quitting via whiteboard messages and stuck it to her boss.

The story spread across the net like wildfire and really got people talking. Some people (such as @adrianweckler) saw through the story immediately as an advertising stunt of some kind. Interesting – I thought. – an ad for who…Sharpie markers? Whiteboards? Others thought it was a clever idea and done by a girl either desperate to market herself into a new job or to throw two fingers up to her asshole boss.

Today the shroud of doubt was lifted and it was revealed that the story was a hoax – a viral marketing stunt by website The Chive.

John Resig, one of the two brothers behind the site said:

“We came up with a hoax that was completely relatable. It wasn’t spread by TechCrunch and Reddit. It was spread by Facebook and inter-office email, everyone wants to quit their jobs like this.”

To be honest, I was a little disappointed that there was no real reason behind the stunt…I’d have prefered it was driven by the makers of whiteboards or HR consultants or some such. Such a clever viral deserved a better purpose than ‘because we can’.

According to Resig, they “didn’t do this for the media. I’d did it almost to prove to myself that I had it in me, To make something go viral at 4:30 in the morning before the world wakes up. You get a pure thrill of watching your site go from 15,000 uniques to 440,000 uniques in a single hour, watching yourself sucker every site from a-z who didn’t do their backstory.”

The story definitely captured peoples attention as it’s something many people will have fantasised about – not just quitting a shitty job but going out with a bang! The story was simple and quick to scan through…afterall there was no lengthy text, just 33 pictures – an ideal viral to spread through workplaces. Speculation about the story’s authenticity and the motivations behind it fuelled the fire and so in under 24 hours the story reportedly had racked up 238,000 Facebook shares and 31,000 tweets.

They say the simple ideas are the best and this viral is definitely case in point.